Invited speaker

Olivier Martin

Université Paris-Sud, France [web]

Biological networks: a flurry of methods and opportunities

Abstract: There are numerous computational tools for infering functional relationships in large data sets, for performing clustering of heterogeneous elements, or for sampling in high dimensional spaces according to an apriori distribution, etc. We will illustrate some related recent techniques developed for the following problems: - functional sectors in proteins leading to backbones of residues - co-evolution of amino acids in receptor-ligand pairs across related species - properties of RNA neutral networks (primary sequences folding to the same secondary structure in conjunction with the natural neighborhood structure) - connectivity and other graph based properties in the spaces of genotypes for gene regulatory networks

Short Bio: O. Martin holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology. His recent research concerns the use of computational tools, often inspired from statistical physics, to tackle biological problems. He has a particular interest in gene networks and evolutionary questions. Beyond optimization, he also works on algorithms for importance sampling and stochastic enumeration.